The latest update, which I call “version 0.03”, now has a ‘cancel’ button on each editing screen so you can revert to the original room/object/mob/whatever if you screw something up.  Saving changes to edited objects is a fairly large revision, and so far the only things you can make permanent changes to are resets.

I’ve built out most of the editing screens in the zone editor to the point where you can at least load a zone and browse it.  Not every field is represented and nothing can be edited yet, but it’s one large step closer to being able to create zones (I call it version 0.02).  No screenshots, since I’m away from the computer with the code on it at the moment.

I’m also in the process of fixing up and moving into the house I bought a little while back, so I can’t really devote too much energy to the code at the moment.

I mentioned a while back that I would need to write a zone editor for Basternae 3. Although zones edited with DikuEdit 3.0x will load in the MUD engine after running them through the converter application, DE won’t be updated to work directly with the Basternae 3 area format — it’s an old DOS app and there’s far too much effort involved in adding XML support to it.

I’ve started building a .NET version of the area editor. The intention is to make it run on both Windows and Linux.

Here’s a super-early screenshot of the development, which I call “version 0.01”:

It doesn’t do much yet, just save and load areas, show the stats of a loaded area, and list the names of mobs/objects/rooms. One of the biggest roadblocks to creating an offline editor in the Basternae 2 days was the saving and loading of zones. Now we just link to the MUD codebase as a library and call Area.Load(“filename.xml”) and it’s loaded. Saving is just as easy — Area.Save();

Most of the work will be in actually building out the screens where you can set values on things, but the fact that it loads and saves zones goes a VERY LONG way toward getting things going.  It’ll get a lot prettier and more useful with time.